By Alex Gallagher 

Moon Valley Nurseries has cut the ribbon on its new 25,000-square-foot corporate office in Scottsdale Airpark.

Its new office, located off the Loop 101 and Pima Road in the Pima Northgate office building, will comfortably house members of its corporate operations teams in departments like marketing and customer service call auditing — and will likely make a strong impression on visiting investors.

“One of the important things to us about the space that we were in previously, most of our employees had offices and we wanted to continue to have offices where possible for employees,” Moon Valley CFO Deborah Keeley says. “One of the big selling points was we could design it ourselves and we could build our offices.”

Moon Valley Nurseries had previously housed its corporate headquarters less than 15 miles east of the new office at a space off of Seventh street and the Loop 101.

But after seeing large growth over the past four years, CEO Brian Flood felt the company had outgrown its former home base.

“Over the last three or four years, we went from a 1,000-person company to nearly a 2,000-person company … so really it became a need to expand,” Flood says.

“We needed to continue growing the size of the personnel and have enough space where we could have an open space and not just use cubicles everywhere.”

Not only has the company doubled the number of its employees over the past half-decade, but Moon Valley Nurseries has also expanded into more Southwestern markets including California, Nevada and Texas.

“We went into new states and new areas and hired new agents, we expanded into Austin and Dallas, and now we’re expanding into multiple locations throughout Dallas and all through California — where we have just about 2,000 acres of a growing facility and have had a presence since 2014,” Flood says.

When asked what he would attribute his company’s rapid growth too, Flood cited his biggest seller: trees.

“People once underestimated the importance of a tree and the importance of how nice it is to be in their yard,” Flood says.

However, Flood says that when stay-at-home orders were enacted, people began understanding the value trees bring to yards around the Valley and our ecosystem.

“During that time, when everyone was at home, looking at their yard and had the time to take care of the yard, they realized how important it is to be outside,” he says.

Because of this, Moon Valley Nurseries touts itself as being “the largest tree grower in the United States” with tree farms in Texas, California and Tonopah.

Moon Valley Nurseries can, with its new home, continue to vertically integrate.

“We have a lot of nurseries in this world. We have a lot of farms, have a lot of landscapers, and we’ve married the three to vertically integrate our company,” Flood says.

Amid the growth, Keeley admits that North Scottsdale was an obvious choice for Moon Valley Nurseries.

“We knew that we wanted to be in North Scottsdale. However, we weren’t exactly sure where,” Keeley recalls. “(We) looked at a lot of different spaces, and then once we saw this space, that was it.

“We loved the location of being right off the freeway and we love that it’s close to restaurants — which is good for our employees — and we thought that the building is a beautiful building with the bonus that we could build it all out to our specifications and make it open and modern.”

With the facility opened after a three-month renovation and move-in, Moon Valley Nurseries is shifting its focus to adding 10 new locations this year. One will open in Scottsdale this spring and two others around the Valley later this year.

“We are set right now to open 10 stores this year throughout the Southwest in Texas, throughout California and Arizona, and we’ll continue to expand,” Flood says.

Flood says that the coming years could also see Moon Valley Nurseries branch out of the Southwest.

“We’re excited about the opportunity to be able to grow the company, and our goal is to open up to 10 new locations per year,” he says.

“What we plan to do is kind of fill in the states that were already in — so that’s Arizona, California and Nevada, Texas — and then once we’ve filled in those states, then we would expand outside of those four states.”